The 2-Minute Test That Helps Every Runner Move Better

Less than 400 meters from the Santa Monica coastline, curious runners lined the corner of a vacated parking lot. It was February of 2022. Blaise Williams, PhD, MPT, remembers the conditions well. He was ushering runners who were competing in a Redondo Beach 10K race through a pop-up experience of NSRL Form, the Nike Sport Research Lab’s newest movement-analysis tool, which was still in beta testing. Williams, a Principal Sport Scientist in the NSRL, had brought his team to gauge interest among the participating runners. 

To the naked eye, the testing area featured a tent, a treadmill and 10 high-speed cameras mounted onto struts. But the reality was much more rigorous, culminating years of professional research inside and outside the lab. The cameras tracked an athlete’s biomechanical gait as they jogged for two minutes on the treadmill. Afterward, they’d receive a one-on-one consultation and a customized head-to-toe report on their movement pattern once it was fed through an NSRL-generated algorithm. The report was supplemented with running form suggestions, salient NTC workouts, and shoe recommendations based on the runner’s current profile to help them achieve their goals.

That day, things were not going to plan. The computer monitors tracking the data inputs were fizzling out in the sun. The cameras were overheating. Later that night, Williams and the team would stay up until 3 a.m. trying to help bulletproof the equipment against the mid-afternoon heat for the following day’s testing. They woke up that morning exhausted, struggling to keep their eyes open, which made the sight in front of them that much more remarkable: a line of runners trailing outside the tent, ready to get in on this first-of-its-kind feedback tool. 

The moment sealed the notion that NSRL Form was a tool athletes wanted, says Williams. “Even though everything seemed to go wrong, to see that kind of curiosity from runners — we knew we were onto something.”

Williams began putting pen to paper on NSRL Form three years ago, though he had been ruminating on the idea of such a tool for years. Prior to Nike, Williams’ two decades of experience as a physical therapist and biomechanist had taught him that runners craved more self-awareness of how they moved, be it for enhancing performance, preventing injury or even knowing where to start. But actually being more self-aware of their movement was almost like telling a person to evaluate themselves brushing their teeth. It was difficult to be in a state of reflection with such a natural act.

Someone else — or something else — needed to be in the room, another pair of eyes to help athletes see themselves move. Moreover, the process for evaluating the runner needed to be scientific. It couldn’t be like a typical gait analysis that you get at a running boutique store, which is usually based on footage of a runner taken below the shin and then analyzed by a store employee who may or may not have any professional experience in biomechanics. The employee would then funnel you toward a shoe to purchase based on your foot shape and your video footage.

Instead, the analysis had to be more rigorous, more comprehensive. If NSRL Form was to succeed, it had to be specific to every runner, bringing a depth of insight that observed and interpreted the unique ways in which every runner moves through their world. No runner is alike. Neither is their running profile, nor their opportunities for improvement, nor their prescription to reach their goals. Every piece of data from NSRL Form had to come together to reveal, in effect, a runner’s biomechanical fingerprint.

“Nike has the unique ability to know the whole athlete. NSRL Form is expansive. The tools we develop study the entire human body as one complete unit,” says Kathleen Poe, Sr. Director of Field Services, NSRL. “That means every human body, not just an elite athlete’s. With a tool like this, we can bring the insights of the NSRL outside of our walls, to all athletes.”

Williams and Poe began field research in January of 2022. The early tests for the tool were unassuming, almost covert: They set up a treadmill and rigged together monitors and cameras in a colleague’s garage in Northeast Portland. Poe remembers waving in volunteer testers from the sidewalk. She read the looks of confusion on some of their faces, wondering what exactly they had signed up for. The research team used field sessions like this, along with the pop-up testing site at Redondo Beach, to dial in NSRL Form’s overall experience for a visiting runner. Satellite locations in Nike running stores like Blue Ribbon Sports in Santa Monica, Calif., and Heartbreak Hill in Chicago and Newton, Mass., helped the research team understand what the customer impression in a brick-and-mortar store needed to be. “The experience for the feedback had to be smooth,” says Williams, adding with a laugh that “waiting 15 minutes to receive your results is about 13 minutes too long.” Around 15 seconds is all the program needs to collect 150 data points across your body to give you your custom readout. 

The initial feedback was promising. Hundreds of tested runners who wanted to learn more about their running patterns filled out contact sheets for future news. They wanted to learn what the tool could see about their running form that they couldn’t discern for themselves. Over time, the testing helped the team arrive at an important conclusion. When purchasing shoes without any consultation, runners generally chose shoes that didn’t accommodate their movement pattern — like how a runner with a far reach might need a more cushioned midsole to help absorb ground impact. However, when presented their NSRL Form data with recommended footwear to fit their unique running needs, runners tend to pick the shoe that best fits their movement profile.

As for NSRL Form’s next steps, the NSRL is already considering where the tool will expand (it’s now made its way to Shanghai at retail while winning two awards at a national innovation summit in China). Just as exciting, say Williams and Poe, is how NSRL Form will expand. Given NSRL Form’s method as a self-learning, ever-refining algorithm that studies how the body moves, the possibilities of scaling it to other devices, sports and products are nearly endless. Hypothetically, a future where you could upload a video clip of a treadmill session onto a phone app and have it send back your biomechanical reading isn’t far off. Neither is a tool that could study movement patterns specific to other sports, such as basketball or football. New athlete needs could be identified and new Nike products created to solve for them. Or NSRL Form could be applied to other products, such as sports bras, that have nuanced relationships with the individual athlete, their body type and their movement pattern.

Williams, Poe and the team of NSRL researchers are intent on following an important point: NSRL Form was never meant to be just a product-recommendation tool, and it never will be. In discussions about how a runner’s final report would look, the team discussed whether to include shoe recommendations at all. The reason goes back to what the team observed during those early field tests, like in that blistering parking lot in Redondo Beach, where the queue of runners stretched out the back, wanting to try Form firsthand. 

“You’ll notice the shoe recommendations are at the very end of the eight-page report,” says Williams. “That’s by design. We’re empowering athletes through information to make decisions based on how they move, regardless of the shoe they wear or even the sport they play. NSRL Form isn’t just a runner’s tool. It’s a running tool, designed to study your whole body. Nike knows its athletes. NSRL Form gives athletes the power to know themselves.”